We might go on indefinitely making quotations from undisputed authorities on this great science of heredity, for to-day it has become almost an exact science. In view of this the exclamation of a writer in the _Science of Health_ is very pertinent. “Who shall deliver us from our ancestors? And if the fathers have eaten sour grapes, who on earth shall prevent the children’s teeth being set on edge? Not nature. She is inexorable. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, is her law. But between the unbroken law and its entailed consequences stands the mother, invested with a power which makes her either a Nemesis or a redeemer. This is the unwritten law in every mother’s heart, and I believe that in all the ages there have been women who have hearkened unto its voice. The son that Hannah prayed so earnestly for, and gave unto the Lord before his birth, inherited a soul that had been to school before it drew its first breath. Slaves suckle slaves; pure and enthusiastic women bring forth saints and heroes. All history attests the fact that great men had great mothers.” That both in the law and the gospel of heredity, of the two parents, the mother has a far greater influence we believe firmly; yet this does not relieve the father from responsibility. The germ from him, which is “bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh,” contributed to the formation of the child in its beginning, must be of high nature and cultivation, seed from a noble sire, or the little life is dwarfed from the outset, and the mother must expend much precious time and strength in making good the terrible deficiencies which such a beginning entails, and then mourn that so much can never be overcome. What our children become depends upon two conditions; what they are at birth, and what environment makes them. That the parents may make of their children almost what they will, that they are in a peculiar sense, workers together with God in the creative and formative periods, that they may by self-culture and painstaking reproduce a generation superior to themselves, are all truths big with responsibility and meaning. That we reap what we sow, is an inevitable law in the mental and moral as in the physical sphere. While there is this great and awful law, I am so thankful that we can emphasize the far greater and wider reaching gospel of heredity. Into this we can put all the sweet promises whose fulfillment is sure—if we are ever reaching up to the higher and nobler aspirations of our nature, and not degenerating to the lower tastes and inclinations. For the law, we have, “visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.” For the gospel, “And showing mercy unto thousands of (generations) of them that love Me and keep My commandments.” For the law, “The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” For law and gospel both, “As is the mother so is her daughter.”